The Agile Architect: A Case Study in Transformational Leadership

The role of “Architect” is sometimes frowned upon in the Agile community as a central command-and-control authority who bottlenecks decisions and limits team empowerment. Or at least, that is what we thought. Follow the real-life journey of our teams as we discovered how the role of an architect is compatible with Agile principles. We will explore our failures, and how we learned that an Architect can bring immense value to the organization through a focus on transformational leadership. In this presentation you can see how an Architect as Leader can help a project scale and can help create a truly self-sustaining organization.

schedule Submitted 2 years ago

Comments

Thanks for the submission, it is definitely a topic that isn't discussed well enough or effectively. Is your talk an experience report or a session? Are there practices / tools that people will leave able to try (like the discussion item mentioned) or is more observational?

The backbone of the talk is an experience report I gave at Agile 2015. I have beefed it up with some more theory and practical advice, which should give people some things to takeaway. For example, some techniques of how to facilitate conflict between teams that are disagreeing on designs. I back this up with real life examples.

Thanks Chris. I wonder if, based upon your learning outcomes and tangibles (i.e. facilitate conflict) if the session doesn't have too many themes in it? By that, I mean I am looking for the thread through your learning outcomes and through the abstract and I feel like there are potentially more than one, which could be confusing.

I can understand how this seems disjointed. The concept of developing communication lines between teams and resolving conflict does appear to be a different topic than architecture.

The main theme of the presentation is how an Architect as leader can help create a truly self-organizing team. We worked hard to hand over control to the teams by developing their skills and building clarity around architectural goals. What we found, however, was that the picture wasn't complete unless you had cross-team Harmony. The Architect has a role to play in this by helping teams discover what is at the root of their disagreements, which also creates a deeper understanding of the "why". Normally we would think of this as being the responsibility of management or scrum masters, but we found that the Architect has a critical role to play in this process.

Eventually, we found this becoming a self-sustaining environment and was a catalyst for our final stage which was the teams collectively owning the architecture.

Now that being said, I can see how this might be too much for one presentation. I am flexible to adjust the messages.

It fits well under "Culture Transformation". I also thought of putting it under Enterprise Agile as it applies to scaling agile. I consulted Naresh and he recommended I submit it to Continuous Delivery & DevOps.

Naresh Jain - Dark Side of Collaboration

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Keynote

Advanced

On Agile teams, collaboration is the way of life. Our leaders want their team members to work closely with each other, have shared goals and even think as one entity. Why? Because we believe that collaboration leads to happier, more productive teams that can build innovative products/services.

It's strange that companies use the word collaboration very tightly with innovation. Collaboration is based on consensus building, which rarely leads to visionary or revolutionary products/services. Innovative/disruptive concepts require people to independently test out divergent ideas without getting caught up in collaborative boardroom meetings.

In this presentation, Naresh Jain explores the scary, unspoken side of collaboration and explains in what context, collaboration can be extremely important; and when it can get in the way or be a total waste of time.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile. In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about Scrum and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins.” The presentation aims to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.

Chris Edwards / Sean Dunn - The Value Uncertainty Game

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

In this highly engaging workshop attendees will experience estimating, planning and delivering a new product and product features. The uncertainty in value and costs will be resolved through rolling dice based on the stories that the team selects and prioritizes. The teams will run through 3 iterations of story cost, value estimation, and product feature delivery. Points will be scored for delivering product features and meeting release and iteration commitments.

Dealing with uncertainty is one of the largest challenges that teams face. The simulation aims to have levels of uncertainty in value and delivery that are commensurate with those found in software development. Some of the key tools for dealing with uncertainty are integrated into the simulation.

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the challenges of working with uncertainty in software projects, and will learn some of the tools that are at their disposal for managing this uncertainty.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

I want to be controversial for a moment and propose an end to IT projects, project management & project managers. I propose that the entire project process is flawed from the start for one simple reason. If you need to run a project, you've already failed.

By definition, an IT project is a temporary structure to govern and deliver a complex change (such as a new product or platform) into an organisation. However, to be truly competitive, an organisation needs to be able to deliver a continuous stream of change. Managed properly, this negates the need for a project and the associated cost overheads.

This is fundamentally what #noprojects is. The approach, structure, tactics and techniques available to successfully deliver continuous change. At its core, #noprojects is predicated on the alignment of activities to outcomes, measured by value, constrained by guiding principles and supported by continuous delivery technologies.

This presentation will introduce you to #noprojects. You will learn how to define an outcome and create an Outcome Profile. You will also learn how to manage change within the context of an outcome through the Activity Canvas.

Sean Dunn / Chris Edwards - To Estimate or #NoEstimates, That is the Question

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

The #NoEstmates twitter hashtag was intended by Woody Zuill "..for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates [of time, effort, cost] for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’." Based on twitter traffic it has been successful at generating activity. It's a bit debatable as to whether it has really spawned much exploration. In this talk Todd will actually do some exploration using real data from over 50 projects at companies ranging from startups to large enterprises. In addition to the analysis of the data, Todd was able to build a simulation model of the software development process to both replicate the data to and explore the conditions under which estimates add value and when they do not. Based on the findings from the data and the simulations, along with an analysis of the types of business decisions that organizations need to make, Todd will provide some pragmatic advice for estimators and #NoEstimators alike.

Sean Dunn - Deciphering the Elusive Language of Teams

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Language is the medium by which individuals interact. Our language expresses our values -- what we care about (and what we don't). Language defines our relationships with our team. What can our language tell us about whether we are "self-organizing team" or not? In this talk, Sean explores how the subtle ways in which our words influence team dynamics and how we, as team members, can influence team values and collective ownership through deliberate use of language.

The team's use of language is important to ScrumMasters, Agile manager sand leaders as it provides us an insight into the values our team members. By being attentive to the team's the use of language, we can identify where the teams' values align or diverge with Agile principles. More importantly, ScrumMasters and leaders can guide the team towards Agile values and principles by deliberately influencing the team's language.

Sean will relate this through common, recognizable speech patterns -- the familiar phases we routinely hear in standups, planning meetings, retrospectives or day-to-day development. These common speech patterns (or anti-patterns). Through examples of alternative phrasing, Sean will provide tangible tools ScrumMasters can use to challenge the team to think in new ways.

* Note that slides are early draft that are being adapted from other presentation. There will be a de-emphasis on "structure" and focus more on "language" *

Chris Edwards / Sean Dunn - Are High Performers Killing Your Team?

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Demonstration

Intermediate

Collaboration is the foundation of Agile teams. Then why do we focus so much on the performance of individuals? Want better collaboration? Get rid of your high performer. Chris and Sean will demonstrate through a series of skits how strong personalities can get in the way of team performance, and how collaboration skills can help overcome this.

Laxmana Rao Settipalli - Open Culture Hidden Challenges

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

20 Mins

Experience Report

Beginner

Knowing challenges and taking them over is what we preach. In reality making it happen is a true success. Agility as a practice when implemented speaks about the thresholds, we debate and blame the stake holders of the process but in reality, we are failing to deliver the essence of agility to the bottom level. If it is just forcing on to the stake holder we call to practice, we can say we are an agile environment but is it how it is supposed to be?

When asked this question time and again, what we truly understand is we are not considering the integral value agile can offer when the bottom level leaders are the true agilist. Are we really not considering this to happen? How do we work to make this happen? Are frameworks built to fit or should we tailor them for the right fitment?

Making leaders believe that they are not shepherds but leaders of teams they work with, is essence of implementing agility all across the environment. Pragmatism is essential at every level of interaction when we decide to implement agility. If the Scrum Master is the one who has to do it, he should be giving more thought on how to make Agility a reality than keeping it to the documented success stories.